Larry Kless' Weblog: Powerpoint

Showing posts with label Powerpoint. Show all posts

Monday, May 3, 2010

More... Life After Death by Powerpoint 2010

As I've been preparing for several upcoming events, I've been spending a lot of time in Powerpoint to create my presentations. I've mentioned before, a reoccurring theme in this blog is the "Death by Powerpoint" syndrome and the challenges that are faced in meeting rooms all over the world. How do we create presentations that engage audiences and get our messages across? In one of my early blog posts I shared a hilarious video Life After Death by PowerPoint Video by Don McMillan, a stand up comedian who has honed his skill at corporate comedy working 12 years as an engineer and manager in Silicon Valley and 18 years doing stand-up comedy. In October 2009, Don was named the #1 Corporate comedian by CBS BNET. This a new and expanded version of his YouTube hit "Life After Death by PowerPoint". Enjoy this little excursion from all the Flash bashing and Google world domination news...

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Duarte Design's Five Rules for Making Presentations that Don't Suck

Everyone on some level must hate PowerPoint, because it evokes the image of endless hours slide boredom and train wreck presentations. PowerPoint first appeared in the mid-1980s and became the De facto standard for business presentations competing against early players like Aldus Persuasion and Harvard Graphics. Over the years it's become one of the most abused pieces of software because, in essence, it's a design tool for presentations and not everyone is good designer. But there are people out there who are trying to make a change and save the world from "Death by Powerpoint". Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte are two that come right mind as they have built their businesses and brands on creating inspirational presentation designs.

Nancy Duarte is author of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that was created Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth presentation. This video, Duarte’s Five Rules for Creating World-Changing Presentations, expands on the trailer that was included in the release of Microsoft Office 2010 Public Beta last fall and was created using PowerPoint 2010.

Rather than look at this video as a marketing tool for Duarte Designs (which it does a great job at doing) – consider this as a public service announcement.

Nancy Duarte shared the 5 Rules in a guest post, 5 Tips on Getting PowerPoint to Sing! on the The PowerPoint Team Blog:

"The foundation of the script came from the Manifesto: The Five Theses of the Power of a Presentation from our book slide:ology which are:
Treat Your Audience as King: They didn’t come to your presentation to see you. They came to find out what you can do for them. Make it clear what they are to do.
Spread Ideas and Move people: Communicate your ideas with strong visual grammar to engage all their senses and they will adopt the ideas as their own.
Help The Audience See What You’re Saying: Guide your audience through ideas in a way that helps, not hinders their comprehension. Appeal not only to their verbal senses, but to their visual senses as well.
Practice design, Not Decoration: Don’t just make pretty talking point. Instead, display information in a way that makes complex information clear.
Cultivate Healthy Relationships: Display information in the best way possible for comprehension rather than using slides as a crutch." - from The PowerPoint Team Blog : 5 Tips on Getting PowerPoint to Sing!

VizThink Webinar: Creating Powerful Presentations with Nancy Duarte

How many of you out there create presentations for yourself or others? Can I see a show of hands? If you're not raising your hand then please stay tuned for the next blog post. Or if I've peaked your interest please read on.

A reoccurring theme in this blog is the "Death by Powerpoint" syndrome and the challenges that are faced in meeting rooms all over the world. How do we create an engaging presentations to get our messages across? The easy way out is to open Powerpoint and start typing using the basic black and white template. But that method doesn't take into account any design elements, visual theory or storytelling, you're only writing the presentation. It's a one dimensional approach that ultimately bores your audience. There's been so many humorous videos like the one from the other day that illustrate the pain that audiences must endure sitting through poorly crafted presentations.

But there's hope in the form of design experts who share their tips, tricks and best practices on creating better presentations. This is a recording of a recent webinar hosted by VizThink featuring, Nancy Duarte, principal of Duarte Design the firm that was created Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth presentation, who discusses how to create powerful presentations. If you don't have much time to watch it from the start I suggest you jump sections #4 and #5.

Creating Powerful Presentations

Hint: Use the Full Screen Button to see this video in greater detail.

They used GoToMeeting as their webinar platform which is now cross platform on Mac and PC. Robin Good just posted a review of the new version here. There's also some helpful information in teh comments about how they captured and deployed the webinar recording.

Suggested reading:
Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
By Garr Reynolds

Read an excerpt Make Presentations That People Will Remember

Nancy Duarte recommended this slideshow by jbrenman:
Shift Happens

Related blog posts:

Saturday, June 28, 2008

More Death By Powerpoint

I use Powerpoint at my day job on a daily basis. It's the same old, same old. Bullet points, graphs, spreadsheets, needless animation, presenters reading their slides, etc., etc. I always recommend to people that "less is more" and using less text slides and more pictures and videos are better. I posted a great video on this subject called Life After Death by PowerPoint by Don McMillan several months ago here and this video follows a similar humorous track.

From: brainrulesbook

Brain Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses. The average PowerPoint slide has 40 words. Use pictures and don't kill your audience with bullets.
More about the "Brain Rules" book and film at http://www.brainrules.net/

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Mashable - Forget PowerPoint: 13 Online Presentation Apps

Sean P. Aune of Mashable has gathered 13 online presentation creators that, as he says. "make it even easier for you to forget about doing anything offline ever again!"

I checked out a few of these tools and they offer a great alternative to other off-the-shelf Powerpoint to Flash programs. Most will allow you to import an existing Powerpoint slideshow and incorporate audio, video and animation elements. Embed tags seem to be a standard feature and some allow for offline editing so you can download the presentation and upload it to your own server or distribute it on CD or DVD-ROM.

I have used one of the online applications, VCASMO, which lets you synchronize video with Powerpoint slides. I reviewed it on this blog a few months ago and they now have an offline version. A reader named kski suggested a similar application called SimonShows which "allows for easier navigation through the content because it is organized by chapters and pages."

Here's the Mashable list (the entire text below is courtesy of Sean P. Aune - thanks Sean!)

jaxPresents - Presentation software portion of the Ajax13 office suite. Works with Firefox 1.5 and higher, free, and can import & export from PowerPoint and OpenOffice.
BrinkPad.com - A Java based presentation tool that allows you to create online and then download to your system to save it.
Empressr.com - A tool for creating media rich presentations online with Flash and Ajax. You can share them with the public and allow them to be voted on.
Google Documents - Google made their intentions to take on Microsoft Office fairly obvious when they finally added an online presentation tool to take on PowerPoint.
Preezo.com - Uses an Ajax-based interface for quick editing. Allows collaboration and easy sharing with clients and colleagues.
PresentationEngine.com - Focused more on larger corporate customers with a monthly budget for little bit higher-end needs. Provides templates for speedy creation.
PreZentit.com - Is a completely free presentation editor that generates the slides as web pages so they can even be edited in an HTML editor if you choose. They allow 250 MB of storage, but no limit to the size or duration of a presentation. Also offers unlimited online collaboration.
SlideRocket.com - Currently in private beta, SlideRocket is trying to fulfill all of the features of desktop apps and adding more online features. They are accepting emails to sign up for the beta at this time.
Spresent.com - A Flash presentation generator that can be used online or in their desktop editor. Results can be published or embedded.
ThinkFree.com - ThinkFree Show is part of the ThinkFree office suite which offers a free online alternative to Office. The service is free and offers 1 GB of online storage.
Thumbstacks.com - A free presentation builder that allows you to build your work right in te browser and then share it with anyone by just sending them a link.
Vcasmo.com - An online presentation editor that allows for work with numerous file formats, video, audio, photos and more. Online embedding and sharing is easy when you’re done, and they expect to launch a Facebook app sometime in the second quarter of 2008.
Zoho Show - Zoho’s answer for presentation software offers all of their usual services such as collaboration, but you also get the chance to embed your shows in blogs or present long distance to a client.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Chris Pirillo's Tips for Better PowerPoint Presentations

The Powerpoint tips listed here are compliments of Chris Pirillo who writes, "It may be simple to begin using PowerPoint… but it’s not so easy to make professional looking presentations. These tips were sent in by a community member, and will help you in your endeavor to create a great presentation."

He produced this video which expands on the tips listed below or read his blog.

Be sure to make your presentation appropriate for the audience in which you are going to present it to!
Be sure to make your presentations easy to read!
Make your presentations professional-looking!
Don’t just have text!
Format the text information correctly!
Add your own information and experience to the presentation!

Check out my post on Life After Death by Powerpoint for more information.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Have You Met Henry?

This post is a break from all the new technology and gadget blogging I've been doing lately. I saw this slide show a few weeks ago and was impressed by its simplicity and design. "Meet Henry" is a nice break from the usual boring, bullet pointed, crazy animation, text heavy, tiny font sized Powerpoint slides I see on a daily basis. This is real story telling. It was produced by Ethos3 and was a winner in Slideshare's World's Best Presentation Contest that ran last year. The contest was judged by top presentation gurus, Guy Kawasaki, Bert Decker, Garr Reynolds and Jerry Weissman. You can see the other winners and honorable mentions here.

| View | Upload your own

Slideshare's Co-Founder Jonathan Boutelle noted on his blog, "The interesting thing is that the presentation seems to have spawned it's own genre. Soon after that presentation was uploaded to slideshare, Scott Gavin uploaded "Meet Charlie". Meet Charlie is a nice introduction to Enterprise Web 2.0, told in the same style as Meet Henry. In fact, Scott credited "Meet Henry" in the description."